I had a small media library for myself, and wanted to automate it a bit more, so implemented arr stack (prowlarr, radarr, lidarr), it seems to work but I'm not sure how to pick indexers. I have no experience with it, and I initially just picked a public one, but it barely ever seems to download something.

I'm a bit confused about it, should i just pick as many as I can? Or join a private one? But no idea where to start there.

Any advice or push in the right direction would be appreciated.

youll have the best luck by adding a nzb indexer.. ive enjoyed nzbgeek

its cheap and has decreased my time-to-mediacenter drastically... the public torrent indexers kinda pale in comparison.

i like to have them all in there, but the usenet/nzb stuff seems to flow the fastest as theres generally more likely a matching file of %quality.

Indexers and downloaders are distinct for newsgroups.

Public indexers are not good for Linux isos, you need a paid service now. They're cheap and well worth it. Easynews and nzbgeek are good ones.

Since you're using prowlarr, I recommend adding as many as you can. You'll get some stall, but that's the price you (don't) pay. If you have the time, choose several baseurls for the failing indexers so you can get as many as possible.

I got away with using public indexers for years with very few issues. The occasional .lnk or .exe, but that was of no issue to my Linux Mint host other than having to manually mark the release as failed and find another.

Recently transitioned to a free private tracker after an invite and zero false positives since. Mostly downloading new releases for TV/Movies, often within hours of release.

The downside is that you also have to pay for a Usenet host. So someone trying to just go the $0 cost route, this wouldn’t apply to.

I started by picking a lot of indexers, trying to cover my bases, but every search would take forever because it sifts through every match to find the best one for your criteria. In the end I pared it down to just to just a couple big ones that even I've heard of and it's been fine 98% of the time.

I've always heard the private indexers are best, but I don't have experience with them.

I wish Prowlarr supported having a pool of generic indexers that are regularly speed tested and only the top X are used for actual queries (one random query an hour to check response time shouldn't hurt, and external searches can also provide for this statistic), either based on count/percentage or maximum response time.

That would alleviate the long queries on a very dynamic approach.

sure but usenet access is stupidly cheap. i think im payin like 1$/month.

i spend more on stickers.

Same story here.

Have two private trackers now, but started with just using the ones I had heard of, and removed a few that kept coming up short.

It works fine, but torrents died quite fast as most people don’t bother seeding there.
For new stuff it worked fine

I would start by adding a couple more indexers but don't go overboard. 3 or 4 should be good and then swap them out as needed. Also something to note is make sure you aren't just "hit n run" on everything and seed properly.

How does one get an invite to a private tracker is it based on seeding or something?

Paying to pirate things is wild. You absolutely don't need to pay for anything. Get on private trackers, which have literally existed for decades at this point.

I used to do that until about 2015.

Even private trackers don't come close to the coverage of newsgroups. Plus, nzb has the concept of releases, so you don't have to guess at the quality.

I don't have an issue with paying, I have an issue with paying for something I don't want.

I was confused about this. Then I remembered that torrenting exists in the *arr world.

There seem to be more and more .exes and .scrs lately.

If time is worthless to you, sure.

Here I am, paying next to nothing, automated everything, living a life free from American fuckhead companies.

RarBG was the worst for .scr

It was actually from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/OpenSignups if I remember correctly.

What usenet provider are you getting such a good deal on?

just checked, i paid 'frugal usenet' 35$/year... bit more than i remember at just under 3.00/month.

thats scented sticker money

Erm, same? Do you think this isn't available without paying someone else?

Hunting for torrents, begging to get into specific private trackers is quite time-consuming. I highly value my time.

Having a few public indexers shouldn't hurt. However you probably don't want to add a ton otherwise you will likely end up being overloaded by duplicates.

But really you should invest in getting into private trackers. Even an entry to mid-tier tracker will get you far better and more reliable results than public. Also the content will generally be much better seeded and more reliable.

I use Prowlarr with Flaresolverr.

Setup the Flaresolverr indexer proxy in Prowlarr:
- Tags: flaresolverr
- Host: http://flaresolverr:8191/ (or whatever host+port your flaresolverr

And then I use these:
- 1337x (Add Tags: flaresolverr)
- TorrentDownload
- Knaben

It's not the best and Knaben is mostly just TPB + Rutracker. But this setup gets me everything I need. Everything wrong is filtered as I made my setup look for HEVC with specific bit rate ranges. Invalid file extensions are filtered out.

For actual downloading I use RDT Client with the TorBox debrid service.

Sometimes some indexing services time out but I'll get the content later.

In my experience, with this setup, I really don't need Usenet or private torrent trackers.

Set your download client to ignore file types you don't want. Like sample files, exe, .dll etc

Yes I had totally done that! It was just an always expanding list as they tried different extensions.

No issues now with a private tracker, ever.